


Irregular Endings

by tweedisgood



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Community: acd_holmesfest, Gen, Minor Character Death, Sad with a Happy Ending, baker street irregulars - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-07
Updated: 2013-11-07
Packaged: 2017-12-31 18:22:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1034912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tweedisgood/pseuds/tweedisgood
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Waiting in a churchyard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Irregular Endings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rabidsamfan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabidsamfan/gifts).



> Written as part of "Head to Toe" together with [spacemutineer](http://archiveofourown.org/users/spacemutineer/pseuds/spacemutineer) and [methylviolet10b](http://archiveofourown.org/users/methylviolet10b/pseuds/methylviolet10b)for [rabidsamfan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/rabidsamfan/profile) as part of the acd_holmesfest

We had waited in places like this at other times, on other occasions, I thought as I stamped on the iron earth in the mists of a late December morning, trying to keep my feet from freezing.

Holmes sat perched on the end of a worm-eaten bench. Ancient gravestones jostled and tilted about him, vying for the attention lost with the names and affections scoured from them by two hundred winters.

He glanced at the church door. “Almost time.”

St Dunstan and All Saints’, Stepney, was once a village church amongst green fields and market gardens, long since swallowed by the teeming city. The churchyard soil is perpetually wet and rank from London rain and London rot. Generations of worshippers have trodden it from first toddling steps to the bent hobble of old age: then to slip, finally, below the grey grass to sleep in swelling crowds beneath their children and grandchildren’s feet.

Some had a far shorter journey.

I did not know all of their names, the street arabs Holmes had taken under his wing but never been a father to, for he did not know how. Some came and went with each job, bobbing up like fallen apples in a barrel, only to sink out of sight almost at once. The core, however - some of whom were even now inside St Dunstan’s, attention fixed greedily on the tale from the pulpit, just as they might have been at one of Holmes’ war briefings on the rug at Baker Street - remained steady, and each time one was taken, he was mourned.

Bob Pledge, lying crow-picked on the African veldt with a battered bugle round his neck. Tall, laughing Phipps, scalded with boiling lead as he watched the vats at night for sixpence. Billy the Shrimp, his sharp little face with the sky-blue eyes that my own hands had closed, struck down with five of his eight siblings by scarlet fever. McGuinness, whom I always suspected of really being a girl, and who disappeared one day in circumstances that sickened me with the possibility of confirmation.

My public knew but one name. When we are dust, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, I am assured we shall be immortal, thanks to the stories. So then, perhaps, may he.

The organ struck up, the congregation rose with a scuffle as a fat verger flung open the doors and peered down his nose at the two unbelievers loitering on consecrated ground. I reached into my pocket for the packet of rice I’d stowed there. Holmes shifted a large box from the ground and tucked it under his arm. He had steadfastly refused to tell me what it contained.

We had seen him grow, audacious urchin to swaggering youth to steady, confident manhood. Now the end of the journey – and a different beginning – was upon us. They emerged from the porch into a ray of winter sunshine, thronged by well-wishers mostly three sheets to the wind already with merry-making, his bride shivering in her shawl but warming the world with her smile. As the shower of rice surprised her she turned toward us, tugging on his arm.

“Look, John, look. They’ve come!”

“Mr Holmes! Doctor! I’m glad to see you, my eye! You’ll come to the breakfast, I hope? At the Britannia, down Cable Street. ”

“Certainly we shall. But first, do you not think you are a trifle ill-dressed for a married man just out of church?” my friend asked, cocking his eyebrow at the other’s bare head.

The groom dipped an apology and set a venerable old bowler over his flaming beacon of red hair. Holmes clicked his tongue, shook his head and offered up the wooden box. Plucking off the lid with a magician’s flourish and giving it to me, he took out an object wrapped in a thick veil of tissue paper. A fine, black, silk plush top hat was underneath.

It was not quite new.

“I think we are of a size; try it and see. I got it at Lock’s last month, and I am assured it is the very latest style. Perhaps a little too fashionable for a…” he directed a sly smile in my direction, “prim dresser approaching his middle years. A couple of outings, and I began to feel conspicuous. Not an advantage for a detective.”

The assembled company gaped and whispered. A hat from Lock & Co, St James’ Street, meant the price of a month’s rent for most of them. As an outright gift, new, it might have been an insult: charity, born from lack of imagination and sympathy. As a hand-me-down from a famous head, it was a point of conversation, a fount of storytelling, a memento of a treasured association.

Holmes had not lost his own style with the approach of ‘his middle years’. Nor his accurate eye: as he had predicted, the hat was a perfect fit; with it the groom was transformed from fish porter (which is what he was, and no shame in an honest trade) to gentleman. He spoke in a bashful mumble around the evident lump in his throat.

“I don’t know what to say, Mr Holmes.”

“Well, that makes a change, John,” put in the bride, and he laughed and kissed her cheek.

“See what I’ve got in store?” he sighed dramatically. “No respect from me own wife.” Then he kissed her again.

Holmes saluted them with a forefinger to the brim of his own comfortably worn, but briskly-brushed, hat.

“Your servant, Mr Wiggins; Mrs Wiggins.”


End file.
